#55 – Cloudy
Ax
I have had many epiphanies as a result of my time on Earth, but never one as strong or as frightening as the one which struck me after the departure of Estrid and the Ralek River.
The night after they left me, I ran through the alien forest near my scoop, under Earth's single moon. Cassie had picked up on my pain at being voluntarily left behind and had comforted me, but the others were unaware. I wanted it that way. I allowed myself to consider the events that had led to my decision as I ran.
Estrid, a typical Andalite civilian in most rights, had developed a Prion virus to annihilate the Yeerks (and possibly – probably – the humans.) I did not hold it against her; had one of my people not done the same exact thing during the Hork-Bajir campaign? I doubly did not hold it against her, because the humans were unknown to her. She did not know them, so she did not care about them. She saw them as an inferior species, acceptable losses to end the Yeerk threat.
Was she right? I could not believe that, not after all I had been through with my human friends. Humans and Andalites are similar in many ways, but they are also different in one very, very crucial area. Almost everything the humans do, their motivation behind everything, is wrapped in emotion. They are by far the most emotionally-driven species in the galaxy. That we Andalites know of, of course.
Andalites have emotions. We are not monsters. It's just that we don't give in to our emotions as often as the humans. I believe this is because we don't feel our emotions as deeply as humans feel theirs. Andalites have all of the same feelings as the humans – love, hate, pride, passion, sympathy, empathy, joy, sorrow. We feel these every day. But unlike humans, we almost always allow logic to override them. They are a part of us, but they do not own us. Andalite emotions are passengers, not the pilot. Andalite emotions are cloudy, compared to the sunburst of human emotion.
The humans are the exact opposite. They understand logic, and they implement it much of the time. When they do, their logical courses of action rival my own people's. But they have a tendency to regress; whenever something happens that makes them angry, sad, or afraid, they almost invariably give in to it. Their actions cease to be based in logic and emotions rule. This is a frightening, unpredictable aspect of the human race. The one saving grace is that humans tend to assert the good emotions – peace, prosperity, and goodwill seem to be the goals, most of the time. There are exceptions. Humans don't seem to understand that just like anything else about them, their emotional and moral compass is susceptible to disease…and there is nothing more unpredictable and frightening than a human who passionately believes they are right when they are wrong.
During the Ralek River's stint on Earth, I realized that I had made a lot of emotional decisions. Human decisions. The most frightening part of this realization was that I didn't regret it. I knew I had allowed emotion to overrule logic, and I accepted it. I liked it. I was proud of it.
That train of thought led me to this one, my most startling revelation yet: the longer I stayed among humans, the more like them I became. It was a slow change, a mutation of emotion over logic. It happened like Estrid's Prion virus – it was slow, sneaky, and powerful in its simplicity. The more I saw of the humans' emotional decisions affecting both them and the chain of events positively, the more merit I saw in giving in to it. There is a very persuasive sense of calm that comes from feeling like you have acted in an emotionally-positive way. The feeling was convincing. It was influential in a way that was hard to ignore. I was beginning to understand what the humans meant when they said terms like "good guys" and "heroes." They have a very different definition of these things than we Andalites…and I was beginning to see things in a more human way than Andalite.
I ran faster through the human forest, as if I could run away from the changes that were happening to me. In a way, though…in a way, I knew I would embrace the change. I wanted it, and I liked it.
In a way, it was also as if I were running toward it as well as away from it.